We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

We are getting so many amazing entries for this contest it’s crazy. Crailtap says the contest will end next Friday with winners announced the following Monday. Keep the pictures coming!

Haven’t you always wanted to cuddle with a tree? We’re nuts about these pillows, which are knitted to resemble Cottonwood trees that have been nibbled down by beavers. Just imagine how satisfying it would be to construct a giant log cabin fort out of them: so satisfying.

What an adorable way to bring nature indoors!

Hey everybody the Urban Outfitters blog just got a full Wild Things makeover. They’ve been putting this together for a while and we think it looks really great. Wild Things prints and T’s, movie links, info on the pop up shop and Molly Young’s check in with Spike. All great stuff waiting to be devoured. Go explore it already!

This is a goodbye video for our loving edit room sofa that stood by us for the last two years of post production. It had taken quite a beating but never stopped giving.

Erik Jessen edited this and the music is Scott Mathew from the Shortbus soundtrack.

Watching a Brian Bress video is like going to a one man show, except instead of the show being in a theater, it’s inside the performer’s brain, and instead of a single man on stage, there are a dozen charmingly grotesque characters running and yelling and dancing and muttering sometimes hilarious nonsense with the rapturous cadence of a mentally disturbed genius.

The remnants of bygone dreams make up Bress’ universe. In the prison of unconscious fantasy we’re treated to a visually opulent revue that’s both exhausting and exhilarating. Backdrops, props, character and costume are constantly shuffling, but Bress’ endless colors and shapes are always beautifully boisterous juxtapositions. In his latest video, an epic production entitled Because It’s the Depression, he adopts the following identities: an astronaut, a boxer, a helpless child, a crafty coal miner, a polygonal creep. And golly, is it fun.

Check out that video, along with a new series of paintings and sculptures, at Culver City’s Cherry and Martin through October 24th.

First Billboard.

Spotted by Alex

Q: What do you get when you combine modular toys with Frank Lloyd Wright?

A: LEGO Fallingwater, a recreation of Wright’s 1934 masterwork of modernism in Mill Run, Pennsylvania!

Anyone born after 1950 is likely to have played with the colorful Danish building bricks at some point in his or her youth. The LEGO corporate motto––Kun det bedste er godt nok or “Only the best is good enough,”––certainly applies to their 811-piece model of Fallingwater, which underwent 14 design concepts and includes special sections that slide out, as well as representations of the surrounding river and trees that are so crucial to the landmark’s aesthetic.

Finally! A toy designed for architects, highly-focused children, and highly-focused child architects.

Even more great entries for the contest we are running with Crailtap. Show us where you think the Wild Things ought to be and you could win these.

My new favorite series of Sonny’s drawings. It’s of girls haircuts. I think it is really a self portrait because it shows the kind of girls he would have a crush on. Sonny, can I have these? I’ll trade you something?

Adapting a beloved ballet into a children’s film is tricky business. Cinematically emulating a child’s wonder at the grandiosity of the theater, especially the jaw-dropping spectacle of The Nutcracker, is almost a futile pursuit, even for a true blue auteur of the genre like Caroll Ballard. The director responsible for The Black Stallion, Fly Away Home, and 2005’s criminally underseen Duma could easily have made a rare misstep with Nutcracker: The Motion Picture. Luckily, however, Ballard had oodles of help from Maurice Sendak.

Sendak’s production design, costumes, and general creative input on the film provide the perfect layer of gritty, craggy humor to a tale that traverses through a dichtomy of dark and light, but often threatens to veer into the saccharine. The dazzling strangeness of Sendak’s subtly sinister influence more than makes up for the unavoidable inadequacies of this ballet-to-film crossover. Nutcracker: The Motion Picture is entirely salvaged by Sendak’s unique ability to immerse us in his breathing, pulsating aesthetic, slicing through the preciousness with a twisted genius almost on par with Herr Drosselmeyer himself.

Watch the full movie here: